Then & Now | Why Hong Kong’s culture of corruption is alive and well, and extremely difficult to prove
- Graft is entrenched in Hong Kong society; just the face has changed from low-level bribery to high-level venality
- However, this is virtually impossible to uncover
Official corruption and public complacency towards it have a long and dishonourable history in Hong Kong. From the British colony’s mid-19th-century beginnings, tales of graft, peculation and associated scandals have been commonplace.
Venality was hard-wired into Hong Kong’s DNA; the colony was “that kind of place” and either attracted, or swiftly created, “those sorts of people”. Nothing much has changed over time.
Culture has played a key role. Throughout Chinese history, local officials were assumed to be on the take – why else would they enter the onerous arena of public life? Only when “perquisites” turned into outright extortion, and administrative efficiency was compromised, did the public seriously object to graft. When this happened, some semblance of official probity was swiftly mandated from above, lest social unrest tip over into outright rebellion and thus threaten the “mandate of heaven”. Chinese history amply illustrates this observation.
Hong Kong’s current anti-corruption statutes were largely designed for last century’s peculations. After the Independent Commission Against Corruption was established, in 1974, policemen who wanted to line their pockets before retirement overseas, or officials charged with issuing hawker permits, building licences or some other essential piece of bureaucratic paperwork, were targets for anti-graft investigators in a short-term approach to combating rake-offs.
Most such crimes reflected the nature of Hong Kong society as it then was (“make it fast, make it now, cash in your chips and clear out”) and involved the sort of officials who were susceptible to tips, bribes and various forms of “squeeze”. These were often poorly paid functionaries who supplemented inadequate salaries with under-the-table payments.
Discretion depended on their ability to deliver the promised results; throughout the ages, corruption has been notoriously difficult to detect when buyers and sellers have been willing, and prices and outcomes mutually agreeable.
